Incorruptible Bodies: Christology, Society, and Authority in Late Antiquity by Yonatan Moss (review)

Though Incorruptible Bodies does not claim to be a biography, its central accomplishment is to offer about Severus of Antioch (and to a lesser extent, about his interlocutor Julian of Halicarnassus) the kind of insight one usually sees in biographical research. Traditionally, historians of sixth-century Christianity in the eastern Mediterranean depend on John of Ephesus’s portrait of Severus to make him the early visionary who inspired the organization of the anti-Chalcedonian movement. By working through his debates with Julian, Moss offers an updated interpretation of Severus’s aims: while separatist thought marked his early career, Severus as bishop of Antioch (512–18 ce) did not seek a division from the supporters of Chalcedon and was not inclined to create a new and different church.

Moss proposes an intriguing method to organize his argument. Rejecting an approach that might focus solely on Severus’s political allegiances or his ecclesiology, Moss advocates that we survey multiple domains within Severus’s thought at the same time. He presents this method as something novel, explaining in the Introduction that his “stereoscopic approach” will grant otherwise unavailable insights about Severus (and again, to a lesser extent, Julian). Just as a topographer views similar photographs side by side to help the brain visualize a landscape in three dimensions, a historian might view similar discourses side by side to access a more vivid picture of the topic under study. Though the model of stereoscopy implies the use of two comparanda, Moss introduces four domains of thought to be considered together: the Christological conversation about incorruptibility that occupied Severus and Julian (Chapter One); the views these men had about the legitimacy of an imperial church (Chapter Two); their ideas about the efficacy of the Eucharist (Chapter Three); and their debates about how to use the writings of earlier Christians as sources of authority (Chapter Four).

Viewing these together is meant to draw what is common among them into higher relief. After all, stereoscopy is not a matter of viewing any two pictures side by side; it is, in topographic science, the practice of viewing side by side two pictures of the same exact landscape, which happen to have been taken at slightly different angles. Thus, by its explicit method the book proffers that there is something unified in all these domains, which just need to be viewed a certain way to reveal their unity. That unity, for Moss, resides in the concept of the body. Severus, focused on the post-resurrection body of Christ and its incorruptibility, imagined that body also to be the engine of the Eucharist’s work, and at the same time held to an ecclesiology that fought against any dissolution or division in the otherwise incorruptible “body” of the church. Julian’s views of Christ’s body diverged, and Moss shows that his ecclesiology and his theories of the Eucharist followed in train.

But to say that ancient Christian theories of the body—whether Christ’s body, or a more generic human body—squared with a thinker’s ecclesiology or his approach to ritual life does not require a new model of analysis borrowed from elsewhere, like “stereoscopy.” Moss in his work is simply joining a tradition of interpretation in early Christian studies based on the same insight, some examples of which he acknowledges in the notes (Martin, Corinthian Body, 1995) while choosing not to cite, or perhaps not being cognizant of, others (Krawiec, Shenoute and the Women, 2001, and Schroeder, Monastic Bodies, 2007, are just two of many, many available options). To have drawn upon this tradition would have kept Moss from having to make a strange concession late in the book: the model that he introduces and argues for in other chapters he declares “irrelevant” for the investigation he chooses to conduct in Chapter Four (109). There, Moss observes that Severus’s and Julian’s respective treatments of Christ’s body and the...